Scratching the seven-year itch of agriculture news blogging

Today is officially the seven-year anniversary of the launch of Blogriculture. This site was, and remains, an area where the Capital Press staff has been able to interact with readers in a way not always possible on our main website.

It has also been a forum for experimentation and trying new things in the digital realm that we haven't always been able to do our CapitalPress.com. Today, it mostly serves as the entry point for our podcasts and audio posts of Ag Minute audio.

But what will it be tomorrow (meaning the months and years ahead)? That is unknown.

Agriculture's use of digital media has grown tremendously since Blogriculture was born. Back in 2006 it took a lot of searching to find agriculture blogs of any kind. Today, they are seemingly everywhere. And if you add in blogs and websites about special interests related to the products farmers and ranchers grow, you can get lost in the digital web of food and farming sites. Farmers and foodies are also very active in social media, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. We have been proud to be a small part of that digital information explosion.

There are some big technology changes occurring soon at the Capital Press and its parent company, EO Media Group. A new computer system produced by the people at Saxotech will make it much faster and easier for the Capital Press and her sister publications to publish to the web and it bring changes to the manner in which we print too.

On the digital front, one of the biggest changes online readers of the Capital Press will see is a relaunched website that is built using responsive design. That means the same website will look and behave differently depending on what type of devise and what size browser window you have. Instead of building separate sites for desktop/laptop computers, tablets and smartphones, we will have one site capable of serving up our stories and photos in a format that works better with the device you are using.

The print and web publishing functions will be made possible by a new computer system designed to integrate with both web publishing and build pages destined for ink-on-paper printing. Our company is in the process of installing that system now and will be rolling it out over the next several months in a process that is likely to take most of this year, and may stretch into next year. It's a massive project for us.

What that means for Blogriculture, specifically, is that our chief contributor here, Will Koenig, and I will be moving to new roles with the company to ensure our print papers continue evolve to take advantage of these new tools. Will and I hope to keep a hand in the digital realm in some regard, but given the size and scope of this project, it is difficult to know today just what that role may be and when we will be able to contribute specifically to things like podcast and blogs.

So, perhaps someone else (or several someones) at the Capital Press will pick of the torch at Blogriculture, just like Will picked up the torch after I moved into other activities a few years ago. Or perhaps sometime in the next few months, new posts to Blogriculture will dry up. It's hard to say. In the beginning, Blogriculture was launched because it was faster and easier to make updates here than on our main website. We also could customize our blog easier than we could our website and add features to it that either couldn't be added to our main site or required submitting a job ticket to a third-party vendor who may or may not help us successfully achieve the desired goal. Today, our main site is much faster and easier to update, we have more control over it and can do more things with it. And in a few months, the CapitalPress.com domain will boast a whole new look and feel that just wasn't possible even in our last website relaunch in August 2009.

These are exciting times for our company, but the excitement has a price of uncertainty for  Blogriculture. We are proud of the role Blogriculture has made in helping Capital Press evolved as a digital agriculture medium. It has played a huge role in helping us become better and faster at sharing information, not just in the Pacific Northwest, but nationwide and worldwide. It has helped us understand digital communication better and helped us communicate in ways that are just not possible in print.

It's fairly rare that a blog stays active for seven years. We are proud of the run so far. What will the future hold? Will the run continue? We will find out this and more in the months ahead.

Thank you, for taking the time to share this blogiversary with us and thank you to everyone who has contributed to Blogriculture as a poster, reader and commenter over the last seven years.

Seasons of digital change measured in ag growth online

By Gary L. West
Associate editor, Capital Press

I took last week off. But if I had truly wanted a vacation from agriculture news and information, I went about it all wrong.

I spent most of the week visiting family in Oregon's Umatilla County, smack dab in the middle of farming country, where many of the recent headlines we have printed in Capital Press and posted on CapitalPress.com were affecting my family and a wide swath of the countryside.

For example, the cool, wet spring had crops behind. It was common to see alfalfa fields with windrows of hay on the ground turning brown because the rains wouldn't stop long enough to bale the hay. Some fields had standing water in them from recent flooding of streams like Butter Creek.

There was talk about Hermiston's trademark watermelon crop would be several week's later than the Fourth of July holiday, leaving a short season for growers. And in the dryland areas were large fields of wheat afflicted with stripe rust, giving the grain a golden tint long before it is ripening for harvest.

My dad and cousin work in businesses connected to spraying farm crops for insects, weeds and diseases like stripe rust. My dad attacks the harvest robbing threats from the air. My cousin attacks them on the ground. And conversations with both of them centered on issues like this season's unique challenges, taxes, fees, regulations and just the physically exhausting nature of the work.

Of course, they both took advantage of my presence to get a little work out of me too. For my dad, I shot some photos of his planes at work. For my cousin, I wound up helping him move equipment from job site to job site a few times, and helped him change the massive tires on his ground sprayer one day.

I have to admit, it felt good to be outdoors for several days, enjoying some warmer temperatures than the Willamette Valley had experiences so far this spring. It also felt good to be out taking photos again. It even felt good to be exercising some muscles I don't ordinarily use when sitting at a desk all day in the Capital Press office in Salem.

The timing was interesting too. Because this week marks the anniversary of my start date at the Capital Press. It was 6 years ago today that I came to work here. That vacation vividly illustrated to me how my early life growing up in the country and professional life as a journalist, which once took very divergent paths, have come together.

This anniversary is special, in that it now marks the longest tenure I've spent with any media organization in my 20-plus year career. I've spent some time looking back at my time here too as this anniversary has approached, which led me back to this blog. Nearly 6 years ago, when this blog started, it was a way I could work around some of the shortcomings of our website software. At the time, it was somewhat unusual for an organization connected to production agriculture to be blogging. In one of the earliest posts on this blog, I asked the question: Do farmers blog? In 2005, the answer to that was that a few did, but not many. It was difficult to come up with even a handful of agriculture blogs back then. Now, there are lots of farmers who blog, and/or tweet, and/or have a Facebook page or YouTube account and use a variety of Internet tools to tell their story, connect with business associates or people that eat what they grow. Today, we follow more than 3,000 people on Twitter, the majority of which are posts by or about agriculture topics and we have more than 3,700 following our main Twitter account, plus more than 2,700 fans on our main Facebook page. Today we have several blogs, are about to launch a new podcast, multiple Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, a YouTube channel where we post 5 video news updates a week and other videos related to our stories, and a growing group of websites. And agriculture's use of smart phones and online services have exploded behind the efforts of groups like the AgChat Foundation.

That's pretty dramatic change and growth in just 6 seasons.

Thanks for sharing part of this journey with us. And thank you to the past and current staff of the Capital Press and East Oregonian Publishing Co. for letting me, and others on staff here and at our sister publications, push the edge of that envelope a bit for the last 6 years.

---

You can follow Capital Press on Twitter @capitalpress or follow Gary's behind-the-scenes tweets at @CapitalPressglw or connect with Capital Press on Facebook or connect with Gary on Facebook.

Reporter declares independence with his own blog

One of Blogriculture's contributors is setting up a blog at a new address.

Tim Hearden, a Capital Press reporter based in Northern California, is launching a new blog this week he calls the Jefferson Journal. As Tim describes it, "the Jefferson Journal, invokes both the name and spirit of the mythical State of Jefferson, a huge expanse of rural Northern California and Southern Oregon that briefly sought its own statehood in the early 1940s. Folks in these parts still have an independent state of mind."

If you've spent any time in the border area around where Oregon and California meet, you no doubt know that the Jefferson spirit is still very much alive and well. Residents of that area feel more connected to the interests of their cross border brethren than they do their respective state capitals.

Tim intends to tap into that deeply ingrained sense of independence and write on politics and other topics unique to the farmers and ranchers in that state, which may not exists on a map, but it definitely exists in the hearts and minds of those who live and work there. For some, the dream of a separate state of Jefferson still exists. This Wikipedia listing describes the history of the effort to form a 51st state and includes links to a variety of Websites that still carry on the banner of independence.

To Tim is declaring his independence and breaking away from Blogriculture. We hope he comes to pay us a visit from time to time. But we also encourage you to check out the Jefferson Journal and see what's happening over there too.

Celebrating an Ag Week anniversary

Four years ago today, on March 15, 2006, we started this little Blogriculture experiment. If you look back at the blog post for that day, you can tell I wasn't really sure what might become of it. The headline on the post speaks volumes: "A trial transplanting of Blogriculture".

I guess I can now, four years later, say that the trial part is over. Blogriculture has endured for nearly half a decade. If success were to be measured in number of posts, 2007 was our best year with 256 posts. Our least prolific year was 2008, with 113 posts. So far in 2010, this is only our third post. If that pace continues, this could become our least productive year.

Anniversaries are a nice opportunity for reflection. There are many good things that we have enjoyed from that first tentative step into the blogosphere for a farm publication. Most importantly it put us in touch with a lot of great people. Through Blogriculture we got to know Marianne Friers and her Northview Dairy blog. That contact spread to our expansion onto Facebook.

I was having a conversation with Tim Hearden, one of our reporters and Blogriculture contributors, about what might be the next phase of Capital Press blogging. Tim, who had his own blog through a previous employer, would like to get more active in blogging again. However, that may be in a venue other than the Blogriculture blog. I hope he does share more of his unique perspective in a blogging forum.

It seems we, in ag media, are a few years behind our journalistic peers in mainstream media in getting actively involved in online efforts. I believe this is because of the differing demographics between readers of ag media and mainstream media. Ag media's readers are older than mainstream media readers because farmers and ranchers, in general, are older than the general population. People working in agriculture have been slower to adopt use of computers and Internet in their daily working and personal lives, too. But that adoption has begun and is taking hold rapidly.

Media, including ag media, will need to go where their readers are seeking information. Increasingly, the places people go to get answers to their questions about what's new are digital media. That's unsettling for people in print-based media because we have to learn a lot of new things that take us out of our comfort zone. We are comfortable talking about things like circulation and column inches. But talking about pixels, bandwidth and unique visitors is sort of like trying to learn a new language in adulthood. No one wants to toss away what they have spent years developing expertise in to go back to the beginning of the learning curve. And it's also very different going from working with a once-a-week deadline to functioning in a world where there's a deadline every minute of every day. It's scary stuff.

But there are generations of young people who learned to use a computer mouse and a keyboard before they learned to write. For them, this stuff is not new. It's what's normal. It's what has always been. Those are the ranks from which the farming, ranching and agribusiness jobs of today, and tomorrow, are increasingly being filled.

So, the trial transplanting of Blogriculture is over. It's here, and hopefully here to stay. Certainly the Capital Press' efforts to reach readers interested in agriculture in the digital realm will not go away, regardless of whether Blogriculture lasts another 4 hours, 4 days, 4 years or 4 decades. As long as there is a Capital Press there will need to be digital components to reaching people.

And now, we have a lot more allies, and competitors, in using digital tools to reach people. Here's to hoping Blogriculture has many more anniversaries to celebrate. And most importantly, here to National Ag Week and celebrating all of those who produce the food and fiber we all need every day in America and around the world. Never has the message of American agriculture been more important to share with people who now live and work far from the family farm.

Happy National Ag Week.

Gary L. West
Associate editor
Capital Press

A little bird told me about some great dairy advocates online

You know it's been a while since you've made a blog post when you can't remember your login. Sorry we, and I in particular, haven't been posting on here lately.

I've been much more active as a microblogger on Twitter than I have a blogger blogger on Blogriculture. But I wanted to check in and alert you to a couple of blog sites out there agriculture folks in general, and dairy folks in particular, may be interested in checking out regularly.

Dino Giacomazzi, aka @dairydino, of Giacomazzi Dairy in the Hanford, Calif., area of Kings County, has a website and blog where he shares a lot of great information about what he does, the dairy industry in general, and even provides tips for farm folks thinking about dipping their toes into the Twitter pool.

Giacomazzi links to several other websites and blogs, including one by Ray-Lin Dairy in Denair, Calif. Ray Prock, aka @RayLinDairy is just getting started with his blog, but he's also an active participant on Twitter.

Giacomazzi also links to a long-time friend of Blogriculture, the North View Dairy blog.

If you are interesting in agriculture, California agriculture, or the dairy industry, there may be no better time to check out what these people have to say. With milk costing more to produce than the farmers get for selling it right now, these people speak eloquently, passionately and effectively about their lives and livelihoods on the farm to the people lurking in the online world.

Social networking: Why an ag editor uses Twitter, blogs and Facebook

When I wear my "online editor" hat for the Capital Press, I often share information with people on our staff about what's happening in cyberspace. Frankly, I struggle to show, or tell, people who may have some skepticism about all this touchy-feely computer stuff why they should care.

How do you explain blogs or Facebook or MySpace or Twitter or LinkedIn or the next big thing to someone who hasn't experienced it first hand? I'm not sure I'm up to that task, because those things offer different opportunities to different people. For some they are tools of personal expression. For others they are marketing tools. You can use them to waste time or save it. You can use them to reach out to family and friends or connect with possible customers, clients and business partners. The secret of their viral success is that they are what people make them out to be.

Perhaps really all I can do is try, in some way, to explain why I have found value in using tools like Twitter, Facebook and blogs, and how they have helped me do my job.

I tend to be a little slow to jump on the bandwagon of the new hot thing. Because the new hot thing may go the way of the Betamax videotape system, replaces quickly by a newer, hotter thing. I want to know whatever technology I personally invest time and my own money in will be around for a while. I didn't own the first generation of VCRs or CD players or MP3 players. For a long time I saw no reason to buy an iPod until after I had a chance to play with one a bit. But what finally sold me on buying one was learning I could use it in my truck, with the existing radio. It was only then that the investment seemed worth it. Now, I have my iPod with me nearly 24 hours a day and use it more often and in more places than I first even imagined. It provides background noise at work, it helps me relax and drift off to sleep at night, keeps me company on long trips and makes walking to the store a joy more than a chore.

I was a little slow to come around on some of the social networking tools available too. I didn't see a need to be on MySpace or Facebook. What got me onto MySpace was an attempt to connect more with my daughter. Once there, I found some old friends I hadn't talked to in years. What got me onto Facebook was knowing how popular it was and wanting my employer, Capital Press, to have some sort of presence there. To create a page for Capital Press, I had to create an account. Once there, I found a lot of my friends had beat me to the punch and were already there. It also gave me a chance to interact with some other agriculture journalists in a way I had never done before.

A couple of those people, namely Susan Crowell from Farm & Dairy and Betsy Freese from Living the Country Life encouraged me to try out Twitter. I was hesitant. I resisted for months. I felt like I had account overload. Did I need another online account? Another username and password? I didn't think so, and I sure knew I didn't want one. What gave me the final nudge to try it was that I could connect my Twitter and Facebook accounts and use one post to update people on what I was doing in two places. That was about three months ago. Now, I am not sure how I got by without it.

I use the @capitalpress Twitter account to post updates from our two blog sites (this one and back4d.com), our main website and make other miscellaneous posts. Through that account we currently follow nearly 200 people and have more than 200 people following us.

Twitter has connected me to other ag journalists and agriculture communications professionals working for several companies, politicians (or their staffers) as well as farmers, ranchers, and others in and around the industry. It also helps me monitor news updates from ag media and mainstream media in California, the Pacific Northwest and all over the country, all in one place.

Twitter tells me what's happening in the wider world, the agriculture world and in people's personal worlds. It's a great tool. I wasn't sure I even wanted it, now I feel like I need it to do my job everyday.

There is no shortchanging the "social" nature of social networking. I feel much more connected to other ag journalists now than I did before using those tools. I have worked in ag media for more than three years now (it will be 4 in June) but I just now am starting to see myself as an ag journalist. That is largely due to those digital connections. Before I was a journalist working for an agriculture publication. Now I feel more a part of the farm and ranch media world.

It has not been all fun — or comfortable — that's for sure. I like keeping my personal and work lives separate. But the fact of the matter is my personal life informs my work life and my work life affects my personal life. I am an ag pilot's son who grew up in the country, surrounded by dryland wheat and sprinkler irrigated hay fields. Today, when I visit my old home, my parent's home (which is also their business) I can see canola, potatoes, onions and even blueberries growing nearby. There are now wind turbines on the bluff to the northwest of their place and you can see steam rising, particularly on a cold day, from the cogeneration plants at the potato processing facilities to the north.

It is my family life. It is agriculture. It is alternative energy. It is the business of the rural West.

It's part of my life and it's what I help the Capital Press cover.

I am glad there are pioneers in agriculture, ag media and ag communications operating out there in the social media networking realm. But I am also disappointed that there aren't more of my peers out there too. But I understand it. People need to see why it is valuable to them before they will be sold on social networking sites or new technology. It's also not always easy to learn new things. They need to know it will help them run their business better or make their lives better before they try to find a way to squeeze one more thing in their day. I completely get it.

Technology and social networking have improved my life — personally and professionally. I reconnected with a cousin from Nebraska this week that I haven't seen or heard from in probably more than 15 years. It allows my daughter to have a window into my life and my work if she chooses to look. It connects me with ag communicators across the country in ways that memberships in organizations like North American Agricultural Journalists and American Agricultural Editors' Association never managed to do. And it allows me to share some of the headlines, stories and posts from our blogs and main website all in one place with people who may not have seen them otherwise. I discover new personal and professional value for the blogosphere and the twitterverse every day.

It's highly personal. And it's serious business too.

Updated blog list

It was a project that was long overdue, but I went through our list of blog links today and cleared out the ones that had sat fallow for a long time or have been deleted entirely.

I have not added a lot of new blogs in a while, but I know there are more ag-related blogs popping up all the time. If you have any suggestions for blogs we should add to our blog list, or find any broken or outdated links, please let me know.

The new list is a little slimmer, and should give you an idea of how recently most of the blogs have been updated, as well as the most recent post headline, if it's available.

I hope that works a little better for everyone and makes the list a more valuable resource for Blogriculture visitors.

A new home for Blogriculture

Blogriculture has a new address.

The URL for the Blogriculture blog is now, www.blogriculture.com. Of course, if you have our old URL bookmarked, you can still find us at http://capitalpress.blogspot.com. But now, after nearly four years, Blogriculture is home at www.blogriculture.com.

A mention from the Old Gray Lady's cyber offspring

Capital Press coverage of the presidential candidates' farm policies, in a story written by California Editor Hank Shaw, was mentioned and linked in this blog posted on the New York Times website.

It's nice to know that someone east of the Rockies makes note that there is agriculture west of the Great Divide.

Thanks to Paul Bausch and ORblogs

Blogriculture is not specifically intended to be an Oregon blog, or even a blog about Oregon agriculture. The intent when I started it was to have a blog about agriculture in the Western states of California, Idaho, Washington and Oregon.

But the simple fact of the matter is that Blogriculture is an Oregon blog because the people who contribute to it most are in Oregon most of the time. For good or ill, blogging is largely a first-person perspective thing. Bloggers write about what they see, hear and know or what they are interested in and the immediate geography around us all has a huge influence on what interests us personally and professionally.

I'm proud to say that Blogriculture has been part of the ORblogs directory/community since the very early days of this blog's existence. If you aren't familiar with ORblogs, that's too bad, because Orblogs is going away.

ORblogs' creator Paul Bausch posted a notice on the website on Thursday, Sept. 4, that ORblogs is closed. He writes that he's going to leave the directory in place for a while to give people time to figure out other ways to monitor their favorite blogs, but you won't be able to find the latest post from Oregon-based blogs there anymore.

The site was a pretty cool thing if you were interested in what the latest buzz was in the Oregon blogosphere. You could go to one site and see things like the most recent posts, most popular topics written about, most popular posts with ORblogs' visitors. You could (and still can for a little while at least) find blogs based on what cities the bloggers were blogging from. What made it even more remarkable, is that this was all just a side gig, a hobby, for the guy who created it — Paul Bausch.

Of course many of the best, or at least most interesting, blogs out there are written by people who write out of passion, not for pay. That passion, in the best blogs and bloggers, comes out in their writing. Oregon bloggers got to share their passion much more efficiently and effectively with the help of Paul Bausch and ORblogs. ORblogs was not a perfect site, but it was a great resource for finding interesting blogs based here and a way for bloggers based here to get some exposure for their little corner of the blogosphere.

I don't know Paul personally. I think we exchanges a few e-mails back in the days I was getting Blogriculture hooked up with his site. But from what I've read about him, he's a pretty remarkable dude. He helped create the Blogger software popular with many blog writers (including the software we use here at Blogriculture). Do a Google search of his name or follow this link to his biography on his site pdcoding.com or on his about onfocus.com page if you want to read more about him. For example, you will find that he is web developer, author and a journalism graduate from the University of Nebraska who is based in Corvallis, Ore.

It just seemed appropriate to give Paul and ORblogs some recognition and appreciation here on our website for what he has contributed to bloggers in general and Oregon bloggers in particular.

As a native Nebraskan, a journalist trained in technical writing in Corvallis at Oregon State and an amateur computer geek, this Oregon blogger just wants to say thanks. ORblogs will be missed, but I am thrilled that it was around for as long as it was. It was an honor to be included in ORblogs.

When computers misbehave

I love computers, but they are sort of like teenagers. They do a lot of amazing things that can be quite difficult to understand. And just when you think you can trust them and leave them alone unsupervised, they mess up big time!

A machine with a mind of its own recently left me scratching my head, and wishing I could turn it over my knee.

The Capital Press has started a new blog about small farms, sometimes lovingly (or disparagingly perhaps) referred to as hobby farms. So after getting the site up and operational (not fancy mind you, but there), I decided to register it with Technorati. Technorati attempts to keep an obviously electronic eye on what's happening in blogs and track things like popularity of sites and topics. So i plug the new information into Technorati for the blog, which we are calling Back Forty, and some machine with a screw loose somehow figures the name of the site is — get this — "Reilable backstreet boys compilation."

I can assure you that there is not one reference to the Backstreet Boys on the new blog. The best I can figure is that someone, at some point, had used the URL we are using for the Back Forty blog to write about allegedly reliable (unless there really is such a word as reilable) compilations of music, or whatever, related to the pop boy band, and Technorati didn't take the information I gave it but instead decided to live in some realm of the cyberpast where someone actually gave a rip about boy bands.

Sadly, the ghosts of that era still haunt us and our new blog. I have the iPod cranking out some country music (The Wreckers, "Leave the Pieces" at the moment) to expunge any boy band lyrics that try to sneak into my synapses. If only Technorati's misfiring memory could be repaired so easily.

Thank you for being a fan

Earlier this month I posted a blatant solicitation for fans of our Capital Press Facebook page, and some of you have answered the call! We have 6 fans so far (including me, former Blogriculture author Elaine Shein and California editor Hank Shaw). Thanks fans and friends!

We've also set up a Blogriculture blog network on Facebook if anyone is interested in joining that.

Shaw returns

Hank Shaw has been discovered. For those of you who don't know Hank, he's our California editor. Hank does, obviously, have a bit of a following in California political circles, where he covered the Capitol for the Stockton Record prior to joining the Capital Press.

It looks like a couple of the political blogs may be glad to see him back. His piece in the Aug. 22 edition of Capital Press on the status of California's beleaguered water bond proposal garnered links from Fox & Hounds Daily and FlashReport.

By the way, is it just me, or does Hank look a little like Matthew Broderick from the movie "Glory" with that mustache and goatee?

Let's see, what was the name of Broderick's character? Oh, yes, Col. Robert Gould SHAW!

Coincidence?

Capital Press in the blogosphere for Aug. 18

A Capital Press article on camelina garners a mention today on Biofuels Digest. The post provides a link to the original Capital Press article by freelancer Terence Day.

The Capital Press also gets a mention (but no link) in the Storm Exchange's Stormwire blog. The post is about wheat harvest running behind schedule in Idaho due to weather earlier in the season (see staffer Patricia McCoy's story here).

A nice little raspberry on top

An article by Cookson Beecher about raspberries got a mention this week in the Biz Blog by Dave Gallagher, business editor, of the Bellingham Herald.

Normally, when someone blows you a raspberry, it's not a good thing. But such is not the case here, or for raspberry growers who are enjoying some better prices this year, if not stellar yields.

The pesky liberal farm media

KarenO made a post over at BlogTalkRadio. Karen reposted a letter to the editor that appeared in the Capital Press on July 25, 2008.

The post makes it a little tough to tell where the letter, by Jim Ludwick of Oregonians for Immigration Reform, starts and ends. So, if you want to see the original letter, see the link. And you can find the original story Ludwick was commenting on here.

I got a kick out KarenO's conclusion she tacked on to the letter, which says "You have to love our liberal press -- always looking out for Oregonians!"

Feel free to check out our editorials and judge how liberal the Capital Press is for yourself.

Shein brought added dimensions to paper and blog

The Capital Press and Blogriculture are about to lose a key member of our team.

If you have been a regular reader of this blog, you know that Elaine Shein, the executive editor of Capital Press, has been the primary contributor here for quite a while. Well, Elaine is soon to be moving on to other pastures. I know not everyone who reads this site also reads the Capital Press, so you may not have heard that news or read the column published Friday by Carl Sampson, the managing editor of Capital Press.

In these, her final days with us, I wanted to make sure you all got a chance to learn about her pending departure before she was gone.

What follows is Carl's column about Elaine's departure.

Shein brought added dimensions to paper
After five years, executive editor moves to DTN in Nebraska

By Carl Sampson
Capital Press

Next week will be Executive Editor Elaine Shein's last with the Capital Press. She has accepted a position with DTN as an associate managing editor at its Omaha, Neb., headquarters. DTN provides market and weather information, as well as news to customers in agriculture and other industries.

During her five years at the Capital Press, Shein has brought added vigor and intelligence to our coverage of Western agriculture. She has traveled around the region learning about the issues facing farmers and ranchers and applied that knowledge to our news reports.

She also helped lead special projects that broadened our coverage. Shein was a key player in our first special report on "Water in the West." That report received a first-place award from the American Agricultural Editors Association, as did the two following special reports.

She shepherded another award-winning series on climate change that involved editors, reporters and photographers from our sister newspapers in the East Oregonian Publishing Co. that received several national and international awards.

Shein's tenure at the Capital Press has been about more than winning awards. Her membership and participation in agricultural organizations such as Oregon Agriculture in the Classroom Foundation and the Agri-Business Council of Oregon have brought those groups fresh ideas to help get the word out about the importance of agriculture to every American.

This year she served as Oregon's AITC president, secretary for ABC's executive board, and also chair of the Keeping Ag Viable committee for ABC.

Last fall, she facilitated a retreat for representatives from agricultural groups around the state that led this spring to a consumer survey on agricultural attitudes.

Shein, 43, is a native of Alticane, Saskatchewan, where her parents run a farm that produces beef cattle, wheat, oats, barley, rye, canola, peas, lentils and forage.

She is a graduate of the University of Saskatchewan. Shein started her career as a reporter for the Leader-Post in Regina, Sask., while working on a second degree, in journalism and communications, from the University of Regina.

She worked for several months at Gemini News Service in London before joining the Western Producer, Canada's largest agricultural newspaper that covers much of western Canada.

During her 14 years there, she worked her way up the ladder to become editor and deputy publisher.

In her new job in Nebraska, Shein will find herself in a place that is in many ways different from the West. In the Midwest, corn, soybeans and wheat are king and cattle and hogs are the mainstay of livestock producers.

In other ways, though, she'll find herself right at home among the farmers and ranchers that she has cared about most during her career here and in Canada.

We all wish Elaine the best in her new job.

Managing Editor Carl Sampson is based in Salem, Ore. E-mail: csampson@capitalpress.com.

Entering our third spring planting

Two years ago, on March 15, 2006, a little experiment began. This blog site was created on that date. If you read the post I wrote on that date, it's apparent I was anything by convinced that the blog would have a long life. Back then, I wasn't sure it would last a month, let alone two years.

Some of the things that we tried on this site have gone on to be included on the Capital Press website. This as been a fertile test plot for our staff to try new things.

I'll leave it up to others to measure how much success we can claim here. But the site has been going for two years now. It has grown into something of a team effort, with 6 members of our staff signed on as contributors. And we are closing in on 21,ooo visits to the site. That's pretty tame in blog terms. It's also just somewhere north of half the readers we reach every week with our print newspaper, the Capital Press. But we've learned a lot in those two years.

For one thing, the people who visit our blog come from a wider national, and international, base than our print readership. We've also learned that some of the people who find our blog or our main website come here because they are interested in the issues that affect agriculture and how that it affects the food they eat. They want to know more about how their food is grown, even if they are not commercial growers of food and fiber. So our blog and our website allow us to reach people we would not ordinarily reach.

Whatever your reason for visiting Blogriculture, we want to thank you for your role in taking what was an experiment for a season and helping turn it into a perennial crop.

Richardson bails in spite of ag blog voter support

Bill Richardson may have got a vote as the best presidential candidate for agriculture here in the Blogriculture poll, but it wasn't enough to save his campaign. The Democrat announced officially today he's dropping out of the race.

We'll leave him in the poll anyway. After all, he's one of only three presidential candidates to get a vote so far in our little poll.

Bloggers sound off on farm bill

The final details of the 2007 Farm Bill are not going to be hammered out until early 2008, but at least now the House and Senate have passed their individual version of the bill. The final version of the bill will be worked out in conference committee after the holidays.

But based on what we know now, is it a good bill?

Wheat growers, who are currently enjoying a record price for their crop due to low global supplies, like the bill because it include price supports for those down years. Karl Scronce, a Klamath Falls, Ore., wheat rancher and second vice president for the National Association of Wheat Growers, put it this way:

"If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times – the direct payment is essential for wheat growers and other agricultural producers. It is predicable from year to year, which provides essential stability for growers, their bankers and their communities; reliable in times of disasters that affect an individual operation or spread to the larger economy and raise prices; and the most World Trade Organization-friendly program we’ve got, which is vital for an industry that exports half its product."

You can read Scronce's full statement by clicking here. And click this link for more from the National Association of Wheat Growers.

Since the Senate passed the bill late last week, some commentary on the bill and its myriad provision have been posted online on blogs and other websites. For example, Jordan J. Ballor on the Acton Institute's PowerBlog, refers to it as "A Fruity Farm Bill" in the headline of a post. I'm quite sure if the reference to funds for specialty crop growers is intended as a good thing or not.

Betsy Newmark, a teacher in North Carolina, is not a fan of the bill. On her blog, Betsy's page, she inclues a post with the headline "Let's give money to the really rich! As long as they're farmers."

Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel points out that the bill passed in the Senate by the largest margin in more than three decades in a post on the NewWest site. That a bit ironic, given that a couple of weeks ago, it wasn't even certain the Senate would vote on the bill at all this year.

Whether or not it is a good bill depends on what you grow and where you grow it.

If you are interested on more farm bill comments from the blogosphere, you may (or may not) find these links via Technorati and Google's blog search helpful.

Feel free to share your comments on the bill here in our post comments or let folks know where your comments may be posted elsewhere. Also look for additional commentary and news coverage on the farm bill in upcoming editions of the Capital Press and online at www.capitalpress.com.